Hey Folks good evening, today I feel a bit privileged as right from early morning I was involved in brushing my mental shoulders with the ‘financial wizards’ and important stakeholders of India incorporation. All from the financial world i.e. traders, writers, analysts, finance journalists and the business media were literally on a countdown to the very last second for the clock to strike 11 and see the honorable finance minister deliver the budget for the financial fiscal year 2013-14.

Sensing the market mood as well as observations from the Economic Survey which was released a day earlier, a lot was expected by the budget today to turn around and usher in a breath of fresh air on what has largely been a gloomy economic backdrop where everybody is unhappy with current scenario.

Well in my personal belief the finance minister has done a commendable job, in what can be called as a ‘proactive budget’ whose policies must be implemented to bring about a complete turn around and put the Indian economy back on a healthy growth metric.

For me personally being a financial writer, I get a lot of inspiration as the Mr. Chidambaram’s initiatives are in line with his earlier statement that “It is our duty to put the foundations on which the young can build their castles.”, when someone walks the talk it good like he did today, I believe a lot of progress will happen in the further months that would bring back on what has been a largely depressing and sagging Indian economy.

In this blog I am only going to look at a few features (that interested me) of the budget presented and offer a brief analysis of some for the purpose of informal discussion in two parts.

Part A

1) Initiatives for better growth

The current economic growth is believed to be tapering around the 5 to 5.5% which is well below the potential growth of the Indian economy, what is great is that they have understood that it’s very important to revive growth, the minister and his team are right in their belief that this would lead to inclusive development.

It’s very heartening to know that the minister has acknowledged that unemployment figures are quite high and has outlined a series of proactive measures to better that, I have been unemployed and for me it’s simple when you’re not working sometimes there is no food on the table. It’s sad that for the year gone by, so many families would have had to go to bed hungry….a real reason to think over and have gratitude over one’s meal.

Dear readers, how can better growth be achieved when the CAD numbers are extremely high, in our case it comes across a staggering approximately 75 billion short. It’s good that the minister has also shown two doors of solutions that would by way of fresh investments help reduce this short coming. These are the FDI and FII policies which if properly implemented would encourage foreign investment and also creates lots n lots of jobs…

3) Food Inflation woes

It was observed that food inflation was very worrying last year, from the way I look at it, it means it becomes even more difficult to put food on the table, one can’t even imagine the scenario if one has been unemployed for a long duration of time!, I like his point that one would have to rationalize expenditure and the minister proposal of investing in planned expenditure is promising as inflation is not something that can be brought down overnight, but in a systematic manner.

4) Boost for the HRD ministry!!!

A mammoth sum of Rs 65,867 crore has been allotted towards the HRD ministry, it’s heartening to note that government initiatives like Right to Education and Sarva Shiksha Abhigyaan are in place and progressing well. I really felt touched when he gave a good note of praise to Wipro Chairperson Mr. Azim Premji who has given a colossal 12,500 crores of his personal fortune for further education, it wise also of the minister to smartly say that other corporate leaders should learn from him.

There are a few other areas that he covered well in the budget I will be posting them shortly in Part B once I have mapped them at my end….please do chip in with your views so that we can have a good discussion on what has been an eventful day!